Archive for December, 2009

The year is drawing to a close and I should be otherwise engaged for the duration of Christmas and New Year. No time for gibber, I’m afraid.

The past few weeks have seen this blog enjoy its most successful month to date thanks to the considerable popularity of two simple movie lists buoyed with a well-chosen piece by Nick Mann on Korean classic My Sassy Girl and an especially canny choice of K-Pop Korner on 2NE1.

Compiling the movie lists proved immensely enjoyable. They’re a wonderful reminder for highly-acclaimed films you still haven’t seen and of the great films you almost forgot about. The two thus far, a somewhat premature one on the past decade and a larger one on films from the 90’s, can be found hereand here.

The four-member Brown Eyed Girls actually made their debut in February 2006 but enjoyed only middling success for over three years until the release of their third album “Sound G” in July 2009. In what would prove a shrewd move, the group underwent an overhaul of their image from the Korean pop standard of cutesy, adolescent, day-glo pap to actually looking like alluring adult women. In a market saturated with increasingly dizzying amounts of kitsch, it made sense to change gears somewhat and embrace a look that was later described as being that of “independent and mature city girls”. As eye-catching as this makeover was, it was the subsequent release of the single “Abracadabra” and the accompanying music video, that was primarily intended to make the real impact. The music video of “Abracadabra” is, by Korean pop standards, probably the most daring and sexually suggestive video ever made by a domestic pop act. Read the rest of this entry ?

Oldboy

There has been an unprecedented volume of replies and discussion on this site in response to David’s recent movies lists. It seems nothing inspires and incenses like the almighty list.*

In the discussion of films of the 00’s, one Korean movie made the Gibberonica list, the Onion A.V. Club’s list and yet another list posted in the comments (compiled by Young Charles Mao-Spears). I was planning to discuss this film much further along in my guest series, but it seems timely to bring it up now, since the list has provided such a fine segue.

The film I am alluding to is of course Oldboy and from an international perspective it may well be the most famous and influential Korean film out there. I remember when the film hit theatres in Canada, presented by Quentin Tarantino and on the heels of other Asian cinema sensations like In the Mood for Love and Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon I was intrigued and meant to check it out but never did. I finally got around to watching the movie years later while crashing on my friend’s couch a week before I moved to Korea for over a year. It was one of my few Korean cultural experiences, prior to actually living there. Read the rest of this entry ?

A previous post listing my choices for the best films of the last decade proved more popular than expected (currently the post with the most comments and more hits in a few weeks than most entries have managed all year) so, blatant opportunist that I am, I decided to extend this obsessive, trivial practice to cover the preceding decade. However, compiling the list below further emphasized how premature the list was for the 00’s. It was much easier to get a top 50 here, for example, and several of the entries below were viewed some time after the conclusion of the decade in which they were made. Once again, the criteria for selection are films that I have actually seen, how much I enjoyed them and how I consider their wider cultural and cinematic impact.

Blumf:a fellow who grumpfs at all genuine sports and sits as sour as the devil when all around him are joyous.

Fipple:the underlip. “See how he hangs his fipple.”

Corsned:in Old English law, the “morsel of trial”, a piece of bread of about an ounce weight consecrated by exorcism which an accused person was required to swallow as a trial of his guilt or innocence.

Philomathic:having a love of letters.

(Note: Across the three posts I have made on this subject, the extract words were all taken from the 2008 desk calendar of Forgotten English)